


i think the kids are in trouble

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 20:03:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5979465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What do you dream about, sister,” Helena says.</p><p>(Sarah doesn’t shower much, anymore. A month ago she got into Siobhan’s shower and the water hit the skin behind her ear and she was across the room, curled into a ball in the corner and shaking.)</p><p>“A lot of things,” she says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i think the kids are in trouble

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: reference to past torture]

 

Sarah wakes gasping from a nightmare with her heart screaming against her ribcage, bird-sick. She doesn’t remember the dream – never does – but before her mind shakes itself to wakefulness she can grasp a handful of sharp and overbright pictures: her eyes all wide with fear, the curve of scar tissue, a sharp knife. Doesn’t mean anything. Could be any number of things, any knife, any scar, any pair of her eyes. She hates that this is her life, now: fuel for nightmares.

She stands up on shaky legs and leans against the wall. Kira’s old mobile throws bright shards of light around the room. She’d thought maybe sleeping in what used to be – what should have been – that sleeping in Kira’s old room would banish the nightmares, but she was wrong. And here she is, on the wrong end of the night, so awake it hurts.

She goes downstairs with the vague thought of making a cup of tea and can’t find it in her to be surprised at the sight of Helena sitting on the couch. They’re both crashing at Siobhan’s for the night, after that long drive north, but more than that: the night is the sort of space that allows for Helena’s existence. She could turn any corner and see her sister there, be unsurprised. Helena, a tooth in that dark and hungry mouth.

“You’re awake,” Sarah says, pressing the heel of her hand into her eye and dragging it upward in a vain attempt to feel more alive.

“I have bad dreams,” Helena says vaguely. She keeps staring in the vague direction of the kitchen. Her legs are folded to her chest and her arms are draped over them; there’s something so sad about the limp bend of her wrists, how her hands dangle into empty space. Then again: it seems Helena is made of sad places, bones whose fit somehow screams heartbreak. So who knows.

“Yeah,” Sarah says, after too long a pause. “Me too.” Helena’s gaze alights, lands on Sarah’s eyes with a sort of curious wryness. She slides over a little on the couch, blinks lazily. Sarah lopes over and sits down next to her.

“What do you dream about, sister,” Helena says.

(Sarah doesn’t shower much, anymore. A month ago she got into Siobhan’s shower and the water hit the skin behind her ear and she was across the room, curled into a ball in the corner and shaking.)

“A lot of things,” she says. She swallows, resists the urge to reach up gentle fingers to her scalp. It’s an instinct she sometimes has a hard time crushing. “Do they—” she stops. Breathes. Continues. “They don’t go away, do they.”

“No,” Helena says. “They don’t. If things are better, when you are awake, they maybe do not hurt so much. But they do not leave you.

“All the things you’ve done,” she whispers. “All the things you’ve seen. Forgetting,” and she laughs, a small angry _heh_ , “is not easy in the dark.”

(“Shh,” Helena had said, at the time. “Shh-shh-shh.” She’d found a washcloth somewhere, passed the wet cold of it against the wound over and over. Wiping away all the blood. Sarah sat boneless on the floor of the shower and wept and wept and couldn’t stop.

“It hurts,” she kept saying, somehow surprised at it. Syllables falling like rubber balls from her tongue, too bright and childlike to stand. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

“I know,” Helena had said, and Sarah believed her.)

“What do you dream about,” Sarah says. Helena doesn’t answer.

“You never call me sister,” she says quietly. “Why is this.”

“I did,” Sarah says.

“I do,” Sarah says.

“Only when I,” Helena says, and she shapes her left hand into a pistol – her index finger the barrel, pointed somewhere into the wordless dark. She shrugs a shoulder. “I am not angry, anymore. I only want to know. Why.”

Sarah opens her mouth and says it, the words both too loud and too quiet in the dark:

“Sometimes I dream about you.”

Helena’s hand crumples, and then it is just a hand. Just a hand, lacking in knife. “Oh,” she says quietly. She smiles at her hand, curled open with a sort of fetal desperation. “Sometimes I dream about me too.”

 _Not me?_ Sarah thinks, but isn’t shameless enough to say it out loud. “I shouldn’t,” she says. “You saved my life.”

“I know,” Helena says. “You said.” Her hand settles on Sarah’s face, the pad of her thumb swiping off some imaginary tear. Then it’s back down with a limp _thud_ on the couch between them. “I remember, Sarah.”

She sighs. “What do I dream about? I dream about me. I dream that I have the chance to do things, and I do them, and I do not regret them. And then I wake up. And I do regret them. And I stay here, awake, so that I can remember what regret feels like. So that I – so that I – so that I don’t. Ever.” And she goes back to watching the dark. You see the bags under Helena’s eyes and you think _she must not sleep much_ but in Sarah’s mind that never translated to _this_. Helena, sitting with her eyes held wide open so that she won’t hurt anyone.

(Helena had sat down on the ground next to her, smelling like someone else’s blood and a little bit like the snow that had been falling outside. Rust and cold water. Sarah had wanted to leave, right then, but her legs were shaking and her heart was pounding rabbit-fast and Helena was alive, looking at the mirror over Rachel’s counter with a determined set in her jaw. That is: she wasn’t looking at Sarah. She was alive, and she wasn’t looking at Sarah.

“I shot you,” Sarah said, words still trembling, all of her trembling with conflicted desires. She wanted to bury her face in Helena’s hair. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs. “Why did you come _back?_ ”

Helena had looked at her, eyes wide with something softer than fear. She’d said:

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”)

(They’d left the knife by the bathroom sink. Helena had helped Sarah walk all the way to the door.)

(She could have killed Sarah at any time. Instead she’d switched the knife to her right hand. Instead she’d sat there next to Sarah, until Sarah had been able to stand.)

“You wouldn’t,” Sarah says.

“Which Helena?” Helena asks. “The one here,” and she reaches up and taps Sarah’s temple, “or the one here?” She splays her hand against her own breastbone, above the bullet scar that Sarah has never seen. “The one you call sister, or the one you leave behind?”

“No,” she says to herself, shaking her head like she’s shaking away flies. “No, no, no, I forgave you for this. It doesn’t matter. Anymore.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I do not like myself in the dark.”

“Sometimes I dream you don’t come,” Sarah says. She doesn’t turn to look at Helena, just drops one arm to her side and covers Helena’s wrist with her palm. “And it’s just me, and I’m alone, and I yell and no one answers.”

“You saved my life,” she says again, insistently, because Helena has to know; Helena’s always the one to say _can you feel it_ , she has to be able to feel this. “I hurt you, and you saved my life.” She can hear the anguish in her own voice, the way it pulls at the muscles in her throat. “You _wouldn’t_.”

She looks at Helena, finally. Helena is looking at her. Sometimes it feels like Helena has always been looking at her. Helena’s eyes drop, and she shakes. Just once. She looks back up.

“Say it again,” she says, her voice a cracked and desperate whisper.

“You wouldn’t hurt me,” Sarah says. “I trust you.”

Helena’s eyes are locked on her face like searchlights; they’re huge, luminescent in the dark. Sarah thinks it’s a film of tears, that makes them shine like that. She looks away. Reaches up, runs a hand through her hair. She’s so tired, suddenly, that her bones are heavy with it. But not the kind of tired that lets you sleep. The kind of tired that lives in the marrow of you – the sort of weight that Sarah is used to carrying, by now.

“I’ll always come back,” Helena says quietly, urgently. “Tell your nightmare-self this, when you wake. I will always come back for you, Sarah.”

Sarah nods, because she can’t get any sort of agreement off her tongue. Her skull is heavy. She wonders if Helena’s head is heavy too, dragging her down with the weight of all the things she can’t forget. She wonders a lot of things, but the silence in the air says they’ve reached the limit on nighttime confessions.

“You should go to sleep, _sestra_ ,” Helena says lightly, like she can feel the way the machinery of Sarah’s brain is slowing down. (Maybe she can. Sarah wouldn’t put it past her.)

“And you?” Sarah asks. She turns her neck to look at Helena, in time to see Helena give a twitchy sort of shrug.

“I am awake,” she says.

“You don’t have to be awake alone.” And Sarah wraps her hand around Helena’s wrist, the hand she’s still almost holding – hopes, despite herself, that it means _anchor_ and not _handcuff_.

“You will fall asleep,” Helena says, voice amused but eyes still so desperate, “and you will fall off the cushions, and onto the floor.” Her eyelids droop, a little bit. They lever themselves back up.

“Alright,” Sarah says, mind making itself up fast. “Come on.” And she wraps her hand around Helena’s wrist, pulls her to standing and towards the stairs. She can hear Helena following behind her, mute, putting her feet in the exact same places as Sarah’s so that the floorboards don’t creak. Upstairs the sheets of the bed are still soaked with sweat. Maybe it won’t be so bad when Sarah’s not alone.

(Helena had helped Sarah walk all the way to the door. When they were standing in front of the elevator, waiting for the descent, she’d turned to look at Sarah.

“I love you,” she’d said, the words like confession on her tongue.

“I know,” Sarah had said, helpless with the truth of it, and waited for the elevator to arrive.)

**Author's Note:**

> I think the kids are in trouble  
> Do not know what all the troubles are for  
> Give them ice for their fevers  
> You're the only thing I ever want anymore  
> We live on coffee and flowers  
> Try not to wonder what the weather will be  
> I figured out what we're missing  
> I tell you miserable things after you are asleep
> 
> Now we'll leave the silver city 'cause all the silver girls  
> Gave us black dreams  
> Leave the silver city 'cause all the silver girls  
> Everything means everything  
> \--"Conversation 16," The National
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
